


I can feel your pulse in the pages

by viverella



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Be Compromised Promptathon, Character Death, F/M, clearly I know nothing about wills
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-28
Updated: 2014-08-28
Packaged: 2018-02-15 02:18:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2212029
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Natasha reads Clint’s will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I can feel your pulse in the pages

**Author's Note:**

> written for [this here prompt](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com/412023.html?thread=7683447#t7683447) at the be_compromised promptathon! someone did beat me to the punch and fill this prompt before I managed to finish my fic and they did absolutely wonderfully, but they did it the other way around with Clint reading Nat's will, so um this is something different! something exciting! something I wrote that's finally only 2k words!! /fist pump 
> 
> I'm not sure if I make it very clear, but this is supposed to take place some indeterminable amount of time after the events of cap2, so SHIELD is small but working on being operational and still trying to send people out into the field to do work and stuff, so that's why, in my head, Clint was out doing spy things. though you could read it differently and I'm sure some of you probably have a much better thought out premise than what I came up with /shrugs 
> 
> title borrowed from Bastille, again

It’s cruelly, irritatingly sunny when Natasha wakes. It’s spring in New York and beautiful, and she’s been staying at Clint’s Brooklyn apartment for the past few weeks waiting for him to come home from an undercover mission, half because she doesn’t have anywhere else to go, half because there’s a slight dip in the mattress where Clint likes to sleep and Natasha gets lonely sometimes. Natasha was thinking of asking, when he got back, if she could stay for a while, maybe forever, but now, she thinks bitterly as she curls herself as small as she can on Clint’s side of the bed, now she won’t have to. 

It’s been a little over a week since the notice from what’s left of SHIELD came in the mail, dated two weeks ago, stapled shut in a manila envelope with a large, red _CONFIDENTIAL_ stamp on it, and Natasha took one look at the death certificate enclosed and threw the envelope across the room, feeling like she was going to vomit. 

It’s been a little over a week since Kate started coming by to check on her every day (like she used to check on Clint, Natasha thinks and feels the ache down to her toes), and every day, Natasha hasn’t felt like leaving the apartment, so Kate brings her food and makes her shower at least every other day and makes her coffee and doesn’t ask or pry, doesn’t insist that everything is going to be okay, so Natasha lets her stay and mostly is thankful that at least for the time being, Kate is taking care of Clint’s dog after having seen that Natasha’s barely capable of taking care of _herself_ (and when Natasha looks at Kate, she thinks that Kate may know something about breaking from the inside out too, even though she puts on a strong face and never lets herself cry).

On the tenth day, Kate finds Natasha dressed in one of Clint’s old purple hoodies out on the fire escape, curled up in the corner and leaning her head against the metal bars, staring aimlessly at the neighborhood around her that she will always think of as Clint’s neighborhood, Clint’s neighbors, Clint’s building. 

“Hey,” Kate says. Her voice is quiet like it has been since the news came, like she’s worried that if she talks too loudly, she’ll shatter both of them into a million pieces. 

Natasha doesn’t move. She hears Kate rummaging around the kitchen for a moment before the fire escape creaks and Kate comes out to sit beside her, offering Natasha soup from a mug. Natasha almost laughs. The three bowls that Clint owns must be dirty since no one is doing the dishes (that was always Clint’s job, after all). Natasha takes the soup. She doesn’t drink it but it feels warm in her hands and makes her feel a little less like winter has settled in her bones. Kate crosses her legs and leans back against the fire escape railing, frowning. 

“I spoke with Clint’s lawyer today,” she says finally, and Natasha hears the way her voice shakes so minutely that you’d only hear it if you were looking for it and she’s reminded, painfully, of how unbelievably young Kate is, of how she’s still so much softer around the edges than Clint and Natasha have ever been. 

“Clint has a lawyer?” Natasha asks, hating how hoarse her voice is from disuse and looking down at the mug in her hands. It’s some kind of potato soup, and it smells like something Clint would’ve liked. Even after all this time, Natasha is surprised by how alike Clint and Kate can be when it comes to the little things. 

Kate shrugs and murmurs, “Apparently” and looks down and it’s then that Natasha notices she’s holding a thick envelope in her hands. Kate looks back up and smiles and it looks a little forced but Natasha doesn’t say anything about it. She offers, “This is for you.”

Kate holds out the envelope for Natasha to take, but Natasha doesn’t move. She knows what this is, because there’s only one thing that it could be, and it feels too final and Natasha wants, more than anything, to pretend like Clint’s just been called away for a little longer instead of having the proof in her hands that Clint’s things won’t ever be needed by him anymore, even though Natasha’s never been so naïve so as to try to trick herself into believing lies. A long moment passes, and Kate sighs and sets the envelope down on the fire escape next to Natasha and then ducks into the apartment to tidy up a little and put a load of dishes into the dishwasher. 

Natasha doesn’t get up for a long time and doesn’t touch the envelope and doesn’t go back inside until the sun’s gone down and it’s too chilly to stay outdoors any longer. When she goes back in, soup only half-finished and cold now, Kate’s gone, but she left a takeout box from the diner around the corner on the counter with a purple sticky note on it asking her to please eat and take a look at the contents of the envelope if she feels like she can because it’s important and take care of yourself, Natasha, please, okay? And this is how Natasha ends up sitting on the floor by Clint’s couch, terrified and staring at the envelope in front of her and dropping crumbs onto the old polaroids and newspaper clippings that Clint collects (collected, she has to remind herself, everything in the past tense now and it hurts and she hates it, but everything in the past tense) to track criminals to protect the rickety apartment building he calls home. 

The first sentence of Clint’s will, when she works up the courage to actually look at it, reads as follows: 

_Last will and testament of Clinton Francis Barton, which means Nat, if you’re reading this, then ha, I told you I didn’t need a fucking retirement account._

That’s about as far as Natasha gets before her vision starts to blur from the angry tears spilling down her cheeks, because she can read every word in Clint’s voice, because she can hear him echoing in her ears like he’s reading the damn thing aloud himself, smirking and sarcastic to cover up the very real fear that people in their line of work must learn to live with, of dying too soon, of one day missing a shot or being too slow on the draw, and Clint, he’s, he’s not—

He’s left her pretty much everything. 

Strangled sounds work their way out of Natasha’s throat despite her best efforts to keep quiet as she slowly reads through everything he’s left her – the apartment and everything that comes with it, the entire _building_ and everything that comes with _that_ (and who does he think he is, trusting her to be a good landlord? Who does—no, who _did_ he think _he_ was, buying an entire apartment building on a whim to save people he owes nothing to?). He leaves her all of the money he’s accumulated in the bank account that Natasha made him set up years ago and tells her where to find all the other cash he’s stored around his apartment and all around the world, the money that he never told her about, the money he hid away just in case, because people in their line of work always have a ‘just in case’ attached to everything. He leaves her his shitty, beat up red Dodge Challenger, even though Natasha hates it because like everything that he owns, it’s falling apart and old and cranky, and it smells uncomfortably like pizza on hot days when it’s been baking in the sun. 

He leaves her a home and a car and joint custody over the dog he accidentally adopted and more money than she’ll ever need, and it still doesn’t feel like a fair trade for just him, here with her. Natasha feels like screaming or crying, but she’s never been good at letting herself do either of those things, so she mostly wants to rip up Clint’s will to shreds and set it all on fire, as if she can erase his death by removing all evidence of it from her life, as if it’ll be enough to bring him back, smiling and weary and sporting bandages all over his body. Natasha wants to and can’t let herself because this is the last thing Clint has given her, after so much giving (giving her a life back, giving her a purpose, giving her a reason to believe in her own humanity again), and it’s the means to live the life they would’ve shared, and Natasha aches at the thought of being so careless with something so precious. 

“Fuck you,” she says aloud, glaring at the will trembling in her shaking hands like if she tries hard enough he’ll somehow be able to hear her, because she hates him for leaving her (even if that’s irrational) and she hates herself for being so broken (even though she knows it could never have been any other way). “ _Fuck_.” 

When Kate comes by in the morning with a bag of bagels in her hands, the apartment is a wreck. There are papers scattered everywhere, Clint’s old field notes mixed in with Natasha’s handwriting practice from the quiet nights when she’d teach herself new languages mixed in with loose pages from his will, and the cupboards and cabinets and closets have all been thrown wide open, spilling their contents onto the ground. Kate raises her eyes at the mess as she carefully steps around a pile of old books and shoes and broken arrows but doesn’t otherwise comment. 

Instead, she just sets the bagels down on the counter like she’s seen worse and says evenly as Natasha makes her way down the stairs from the second floor, “Morning.” 

Natasha shoves her hands out in Kate’s direction, holding out Clint’s old bow and his quiver of trick arrows to her, and doesn’t meet her eyes. 

“He wanted you to have these,” she says shortly. 

Kate nods and calmly takes the bow from her and slings the quiver over her shoulder, though Natasha could swear that her hands are shaking (and archers can’t afford to shake, Clint once told her). 

“I figured,” Kate says quietly. She presses her mouth into a thin line and looks down at her feet, and when she speaks, her voice wavers dangerously for the first time in the several days since the news came. “He always said, y’know, if something happened to him, the world needed a Hawkeye, so if he ever…” 

Her voice trails off and she blinks twice, hard, like she’s trying her very best not to fall apart, to be strong and whole after Clint’s death has cut away at her, and Natasha thinks she can see tears shining in her eyes. Natasha tries to remember what it was like to be only twenty and bright and fresh-faced, tries to remember what it felt like to know death for the first time, but finds that when she really thinks about it, death has always been a fixed point in her world, that death, whether it be hers or others', has always been looming on the horizon, but it’s never felt like this, so visceral and real and significant. She supposes, she thinks as she looks between the two of them, veteran spy and newly made hero, that maybe they’re not so different after all, because this is the first time Natasha has really felt it too. 

“You’ll do fine,” Natasha says, wincing at the way her voice breaks and wishing that she could say the same for herself, because all she knows now is that life after Clint is a lot like life before Clint, only that now she knows what it means to be worth something to someone worth believing in, and the darkness that threatened to swallow her whole in her youth feels a lot more like drowning. 

**Author's Note:**

> kudos and comments are very appreciated!
> 
> come find me on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/) if you like!


End file.
